TBT: The Racist in the White House
Trump's Racism is Central to His Politics
I wrote this post five years ago yesterday:
The focus was on President Donald Trump’s racism. We were already seeing attacks on Asian Americans and threats to Asian-owned business. Trump, who had declared a state of emergency just a week earlier in an usually sober speech, was back to looking for scapegoats and finding ways to avoid accountability for his administration’s failures while riling up his base.
Five years is a long time, but we still live in the shadow of the politics created by the virus. Trump brings his own evils to the process, but the virus didn’t just infect the body. It infected the collective mind and distorted our politics.
Partly, this is due to the constantly shifting science. Trump was not wrong to point to China — we still aren’t completely sure about how the virus started — but he was wrong to use it as he did to attack Chinese Americans, which in our culture is an attack on all East Asians.
The shifts in science and changing recommendations should have been expected, given the nature of the virus and our lack of real knowledge about how it worked. The shifts lent fuel to the naysayers, and allowed an ugly backlash to fester and explode — especially after the police killings of Brianna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black Americans led to mass protests for justice.
The longstanding divisions only widened and exacerbated, becoming political fodder for Trump and his acolytes. He would go onto lose his re-election campaign and then to cry fraud as he churned up his supporters into. frenzy and watched as they attacked the Capitol Building.
I want to finish by going back to March 2020, which was a surreal moment. Covid went from something on the news to a central part of our lives, a new reality that included more than a million dead in the United States and the shuttering of much of society. The NBA had canceled games. The NCAA would follow, canceling March Madness (and ending the best Rutgers basketball season since the undefeated ‘75-’76 campaign). Baseball delayed its season. Schools closed and businesses were disrupted.
We were in South Carolina for a long weekend with family. Newark Liberty Airport was eerily empty as we waited for our flight down, even though we were there at what normally should have been a busy time.
All around us was that sense of dread that has never fully left us, but also a kind of “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” kind of vibe. A sense that we should party because there might not be a chance to do so going forward.
We visited a whiskey bar — The Roasting Room —and saw the impressive Michael Tracy on Friday, March 13, the last show before the venue closed for several months. It was the same day as Trump’s declaration of a state of emergency.
We toured Savannah that Saturday and ended up down at River Street, where the St. Patrick’s Day Parade would have taken place. The parade had been canceled, but the crowds still came and was in a mood to party.
This is how it started for me, what I remember.
Look for my Savannah poem on Sunday.